Blood Trance Read online

  “Alex, what else was clean?”

  I'd already pointed that out in an earlier trance.

  “Indulge your big sister.”

  Not those pale yellow walls. Not the yellow and light blue couch. Definitely not the white carpeting. All of those had blood spread or splattered over them. The only things that I noticed that were clean were the knife and Loretta's beige corduroy jumper that hung loose and formless over her body.

  “But why would the dress be clean?”

  I didn't know. Of all things, that confused me the most. And what was that business outside with the hose?

  “Alex, pull up that image again—go back to that May afternoon, go back to that time when you were standing there and Loretta appeared in the kitchen doorway,” she commanded. “Just imagine that your memory is a piece of videotape that you can rewind and replay. Let me know when you're there.”

  It didn't take much. It was just like going through a door, passing into another chamber, passing from the blackness of my trance back to that horrible day. I was either that good or I'd visited the murder scene enough times. For whatever reason, my memory was indeed like a videotape that I could easily access. Yes, I was there, standing by the body.

  “Good. Now you heard Loretta and you looked up and she was standing in front of you. Do you have it?”

  Yes. The image of Loretta burst in front of me. Pale skin. Gray hair. Chicago Cutlery knife in hand.

  “Okay, hold it right there. Pretend it's a photograph that you can hold and study.” My sister offered her cue: inhale, deep exhale. “Tell me, Alex, do you see any blood on her dress?”

  In my mind's eye, I was looking at a photographlike picture of Loretta as she emerged from the kitchen. She'd just blurted her confession, and she was there, knife in hand. Beige corduroy jumper, big and baggy. Loose-fitting. A jumper to hide in, one that didn't reveal a bit of her figure. White blouse, too, with a tall collar. Very clean. Very pressed and white. Sleeves that emerged and went all the way down to her wrists.

  That was odd. There was blood splattered on the furniture, on the walls, but nothing on her clothing. I studied Loretta. No. No blood on her whatsoever. A bloody pool of water had been found outside the house, where someone had evidently rinsed off with a hose, but there'd been no soiled blouse or shirt. That didn't make any sense, did it?

  “No.”

  So maybe Maddy was right and the police wrong. In the first week after the murder, I'd gone over my story with the authorities at least four times. Finally, in an attempt to get more, Alfred, the Jamaican man who worked as my sister's male nurse, bodyguard, and chauffeur, had set up a video camera and taped me as Maddy hypnotized and regressed me back to that time. It was all done according to the strict protocol of forensic hypnosis, which required that all of my words and reflections be captured and recorded. That videotape was then delivered to the police where it became a key source of information, because Loretta had barely spoken a word since that night. She was down there in some Cook County jail, eyes open but mouth neither confirming her guilt nor providing information of any sort that might free her. Loretta, practically mute since she'd emerged from the kitchen in her corduroy jumper, clutching that shiny Chicago Cutlery knife and claiming: “I killed her.”

  Those were her words, no doubt about it, and the police were proceeding as if that were the absolute truth, for they had nothing else to go on, nothing else really to pursue. Which was what irritated Maddy so much, for evidence or not, proof or not, Loretta had been her client once, her subject, down in Chicago. And even though that had been several years ago and Maddy had seen Loretta for only a few months before that ass of a bus driver had plowed into Maddy, my sister was sure of Loretta's innocence. Quite positive, as a matter of fact, though I wasn't sure I agreed with her.

  “Well, we'll just have to keep at this, Alex, until we unearth the real truth.”

  Chapter 3

  Before I'd first been hypnotized years ago by Maddy, my biggest fear was the standard one, that I would fall into a trance and be made to do all sorts of weird things. Like get on a table and take off all my clothes. Or French-kiss a dog. Or reveal secrets, usually the sexual kind, that should always remain hidden. But I'd quickly learned otherwise —that while a skilled hypnotist could lead me into a situation where I might act uninhibited, I would never do anything I really didn't want to.

  And I didn't want to be in this trance anymore.

  So in my darkness, I stirred and rolled as if I were trying to fight off a dream. I was sick of all the blood. About all that was left was to count the splatter marks and study their directionality, which held no interest or appeal, and so I had to push my way back to the surface. It was as if I knew I was in a dream and if I pushed hard enough, I could get out of it, I could wake myself. I felt myself begin to squirm, then sort of descend, fall out of the dark heaven. Yes, I sensed something beneath me now, the smooth black leather of the recliner. My eyelids fluttered. The darkness was losing to the light. Everything was becoming brighter.

  My trance-groggy eyes opened, and I said, “I can't do any more right now.”

  I pushed myself up, straddling the long black leather recliner, and stared out the French doors in front of me. Out there past the green trees and down the hill stretched the freshwater sea of Lake Michigan, perhaps brown and murky some 350 miles to the south near Chicago and the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, but up here clean and pure. Totally Caribbeanesque in color. Far in the distance I saw white triangles, and knew that I'd rather be sailing on this perfect June day than sitting inside, hypnotically exploring death.

  I turned to the recliner that was just a couple of feet to the left of mine, saw my sister, Maddy, lying there in a blue denim shirt and black pants. Wearing sunglasses, too, of course. She always did, day and night, because she'd lost her sight in her teens to congenital eye disease, and her eyes just rolled this way and that, which was a bit disconcerting if you were looking at her. And which was why she hadn't seen the Chicago Transit Authority bus barreling down on her.

  Turning her head as if she were looking at me through those large shades, my ever-poised, ever-polished sister, who nevertheless relished Helen Keller jokes, said “I'm sorry to put you through this so many times, Alex. It just doesn't make sense.”

  “I know.”

  “But I keep thinking something will turn up.”

  “I think I've told you everything and then some. After all, hypnosis isn't a real truth serum. I mean, maybe I'm going to start making up stuff.”

  “Don't be silly.”

  I got up, started pacing in that ballroomlike attic room with its arched, thirty-foot ceiling. I was Maddy's little brother—younger by some three years—but I was also her new employee, hired to search for and go after things she couldn't. Several months ago I'd quit my exceedingly boring job as a technical writer in Minneapolis and moved to Madeline's island, and this, Loretta's case, was our first real attempt. The idea was that I would explore the outer world and then hypnotically re-create my experiences so that my blind and immobilized sister could see them, perhaps in a way even feel them, and then comment on it all. Simply, I was to be her outer-world probe, her mesmerized gofer. That was the way she had it figured, anyway. Maddy, who was undoubtedly the most insightful and intuitive person I had ever met, and I, who could enter hypnosis in a matter of seconds and disappear into the ultimate black hole of trances, the somnambulistic state.

  Maddy said, “I'm hungry.”

  “You're always hungry.”

  “So?”

  “So how do you keep so thin?”

  “I roll a lot,” she said, referring to her daily wheelchair treks on the paved paths of her island. “Let's go down for lunch. I guess this afternoon we're just going to have to start at the beginning of the week, when you first went to Loretta's.”

  “Yes, boss lady.”

  “Maybe we can try to get a clearer idea of who was following you.”

  “Well, I don't know if there'
s more to tell you, but if we can figure that one out, then we should have the whole thing solved. I'm just assuming that whoever was tailing me was not only the one who attacked me, but also the same person who killed Helen.”

  “Perhaps, but then maybe that's where our thinking's been wrong,” said Maddy. “Would you help me here?”

  “Sure.”

  I tried not to feel sorry for my sister, the double-crip, as I sometimes called her, but as I saw her grope for the wheelchair she could not see, it was hard not to. Maddy was both blind and half-paralyzed—her spine had been snapped and her legs forever stilled by that bus that clipped her—yet I was amazingly healthy. Why? And when, I often wondered, would I get what I deserved?

  As I went to the leather recliner and helped lift her into her wheelchair, I again admired her beauty. She had never seen herself as an adult, so perhaps she still visualized herself as a cute but gangly, tomboyish girl. All legs and arms, big smile. And that's what was sad, because my big sister had matured into a very beautiful woman. Short brown hair, long thin arms and legs, long trim waist, and of course that long neck. She had a kind of Breakfast at Tiffany's look. Elegantly casual, that was her, and I knew that if she were both a seeing and walking person, she would have suitors galore. Probably children, too, who'd be totally and disgustingly gorgeous. Instead, however, she'd turned her multimillion-dollar settlement from the bus company into mucho multimillions on the stock market, had bought this decrepit mansion on this private island, then squirreled herself away here.

  She reached down and positioned the legs she could not sense, made sure they were in place in her chair, strapped them down with strips of Velcro, then spun herself around. I watched as she felt for the end of the recliner, turned the chair a bit more, then started wheeling herself toward the door. She was that good, that clever, having filled her world full of markers and buoys that I never even noticed.

  “I want to go back over who attacked you as well as this Shakespeare stuff. I mean the poem Loretta recited.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  I feigned aloofness, my voice light and casual, but actually every bit of my attention was on Maddy, who was wheeling toward a back door. She insisted on doing as much on her own as possible, and I knew she was right in that approach, but half the time it drove me crazy. Like, was she going to miss the door right now and hit the wall? My body tensed. Maddy had a wandlike thing rigged to her wheelchair, a flexible metal pole that hung out in front and worked like a blind person's cane. And yes, she was going to hit the wall, and no, I had to be silent. Shit, I thought, tensing as I slowed to a stop. I didn't say anything because I knew from experience that would piss her off, and instead I watched as she gently glided toward the wall, the wand-thing hit the wood, and Maddy braked. She reached ahead, felt for the corner of the wall, adjusted her course, and wheeled herself on.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, moved on through this enormous attic room that was the size of a Viennese ballroom, and passed the huge Tiffany dome that hovered over the main staircase, a huge circular affair. I followed Maddy around and past that, through a back door, and into the rear part of the third floor. When the original owner, a Chicago brewer, had built this twenty-five-room house as his summer retreat, this back part of the attic had been finished off and part of the household staff had lived up here. Now, however, this expansive servants’ living room was full of mattresses and trunks of abandoned ball gowns, old bird's-eye maple dressers, wicker cribs, and barrels full of soap flakes. Junk that had been stashed up here over the decades and no one had bothered to remove. I think Maddy liked having all this stuff up here, too. The layers of mustiness had a certain richness to them, something for the nose to mine over and over again. Or maybe it was because it was like an obstacle course that she found amusing to steer through, which she did with great ease.

  In any case, while Maddy had made great strides in repairing the rest of the house, she'd left this back part of the attic nearly untouched. And I followed her around a pile of leatherbound photo albums that were covered with a dingy sheet, then down a rear hall, and toward the elevator, an old rope one that she'd had converted to electrical power. Maddy pulled up the lift's two wooden safety gates, boarded, and I stepped onto it.

  Closing the gates behind us, I said, “Wasn't this thing used as a broom closet for the last fifty years?”

  “Don't worry. I had repairmen all up and down it. It couldn't be safer.” She hit the button, and we lurched downward. “Just admire the conveniences of the modern world, Alex. It used to take a manservant to pull this up and down.”

  “Just like a giant dumbwaiter.”

  “Exactly.” Casually, she added, “Oh, Alex, I forgot to tell you I spoke to my lawyer this morning.”

  I knew that tone, that high-pitched, cavalier way she just sort of dropped things that I didn't really want to know. What was it now?

  “And he said he might really be able to get permission.”

  As the lift lowered us past the second-floor rear hall, I asked, “Permission for what, Maddy?”

  “Of course, the bail is awfully high.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “But that doesn't really matter. It's only money, and I'm sure she won't go anywhere. As a matter of fact, if I remember correctly, I don't think she can swim.”

  I shook my head as we reached the ground floor with a clank, and said, “I thought I talked you out of that idea.”

  “Only for about fifteen minutes.”

  “Why don't you and I go down to Chicago? We could just get on a plane. Wouldn't that be easier? It would certainly be a lot less complicated.”

  Maddy said, “No, I don't think it would be. You know, the city and everything. It would be so distracting. Here everything's so quiet.”

  “Well, I still think it's incredibly stupid.”

  “Oh, Alex, don't be so stuffy. Loosen up, would you?”

  I reached for the slatted wooden gates, lifted them both, and replied, “Don't try to derail me, all right? I just think it's stupid. I mean, it sounds like a bad Agatha Christie novel, bringing someone charged with murder not only into your home but onto your island. Watch, there'll probably be a big storm, the power will go out, and we'll all get hacked to pieces.”

  “Oh, stop it.” Maddy shook her head, rolled out of the elevator and into the rear hall. “Loretta didn't kill her stepmother, and you know it.”

  “I know what I saw, her standing there with that knife, claiming she'd done it. And maybe she did.”

  I followed after my dear sister, who'd always done everything the way she saw fit. Granted, she was right just about everything—her sage stockbroker, for example, had highly recommended against investing in a certain small medical company, but Maddy went ahead, bought two million shares of Amgen and made a killing—but too often my younger-sibling opinions were requested only if they confirmed Big Sister's beliefs. It was the biggest battle we had—or rather I had, for Maddy saw this issue as my problem alone. So I knew as I trekked after her through the back hall and then the pantry that there'd be no talking her out of this one.

  “Okay… when's Loretta coming?”

  “The judge is signing the papers today.”

  “What?”

  “She'll be here tomorrow afternoon.”

  Maddy and I had lunch on the many-columned veranda. It was a true veranda, too, not a porch, for it ran halfway down one side of the house, then along the front where we sat, then curled around the other side and ended in a screen porch. At one time these gray planks had been lined with wicker and potted palms, though now only a few rockers were left.

  If a house had a personality, I thought, sitting there, rocking, eating a sandwich and staring down at Lake Michigan, this one most assuredly did. Or if this large structure with its white clapboard, green roof, and all these pillars, were a living thing, this one was. And it had nearly died before Maddy bought it and spent well over half a million dollars stabilizing it and bringing it back to life. The
family that had built it had peaked in the 1890s, then coasted all the way into the 1970s on old fame and wealth until alcoholism had nearly wiped them out. Now, Maddy had recounted, the last of the heirs were living on the last of the money, scattered across the country, and all were reportedly deep into twelve-step recovery programs. Despite the tragedies that had plagued the family, though, one could sense that this house had always been loved, had always gathered love and held it, and Maddy was the perfect person to now assume ownership. The tragedies of her own life had forced her to retreat here, and she was resuscitating this island estate as the center of her world, one that she could completely control. She knew every corner and board within the house, just about every bush and tree on the island. Sometimes I was sure she'd never leave here again.

  We ate turkey sandwiches with garlic mustard and sprouts, cups of chilled vegetable soup, and drank, of course, iced tea with lots of lemons. That was Maddy's beverage of choice, and she was rarely without a glass of it at hand from midmorning until early evening. Maddy carried a cordless phone in a holster on her wheelchair, and it seemed every hour or two she was using it as an intercom to call Solange, her Jamaican housekeeper and companion, for more lemons or ice or tea.

  “So tell me about Lucretia,” said Maddy, blotting the last of the crumbs from her lips.

  “Loretta was obsessed by her story. I think that's the interesting part—that whole week before the murder, Loretta was carrying a copy of Shakespeare's ‘The Rape of Lucrece,’” I began, sitting back in the wicker rocker, glancing at Maddy, then out at the lake.

  “There's something there, though I'm not quite sure what”

  “But that's how you knew she intended to kill herself?”

  I nodded, which did nothing for the unsighted, then said, “Right. Lucretia was a Roman woman who yielded to rape rather than be killed and framed in an adulterous situation. The next day, however, she gathered her husband and family and told them what had happened. Even though her family said she was innocent, she protested, and then took a knife and stabbed herself in the heart.